When a hidden volume is mounted, the operating system and third-party applications may write to non-hidden volumes information about the data stored in the hidden volume (e.g. filenames). It is important to look for such kind of information.

When a hidden volume is mounted, the operating system and third-party applications may write to non-hidden volumes information about the data stored in the hidden volume (e.g. filenames). It is important to look for such kind of information.

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Previous versions of encrypted volumes may be found in the filesystem journal. It is important to track any changes within the free space of the outer volume to detect presence of a hidden volume.

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Previous versions of encrypted containers may be found in the journaling filesystems. It is important to track any changes within the free space of the outer volume to detect presence of a hidden container.

== Hidden Operating Systems ==

== Hidden Operating Systems ==

Revision as of 15:59, 20 July 2008

TrueCrypt is an open source program to create and mount virtual encrypted disks in Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Linux and OS X as well as Whole Disk Encryption on Windows. It provides two levels of plausible deniability (hidden values / no signatures to make a distinction from random data), on the fly encryption and supports various encryption algorithms (AES-256, Serpent and Twofish). As of version 6.0 TrueCrypt now supports hidden Operating Systems (Windows only).

Contents

Forensic Acquisition

If you encounter a system that has a mounted TrueCrypt drive, it is imperative that you capture the contents of the encrypted drive before shutting down the system. Once the system is shutdown, the contents will be inaccessible unless you have the proper encryption key generated by a user's password. You may also need an additional datafile.

Attacks

The only option for acquiring the content of a dismounted TrueCrypt drive is to do a brute-force password guessing attack. AccessData'sPassword Recovery Toolkit and Distributed Network Attack (DNA) can both perform such an attack, but DNA is faster.

TrueCrypt also supports keyfiles (it uses the first 1024 kilobytes of any file, but can also use it's PRNG to generate such keys). It is important to look for anything that might be used as a keyfile (such as a 1024k file on a USB stick).

Hidden volumes

Hidden volume is a volume hidden within the free space of another TrueCrypt volume. Even when the outer volume is mounted, it is hard to prove whether there is a hidden volume or not.

When a hidden volume is mounted, the operating system and third-party applications may write to non-hidden volumes information about the data stored in the hidden volume (e.g. filenames). It is important to look for such kind of information.

Previous versions of encrypted containers may be found in the journaling filesystems. It is important to track any changes within the free space of the outer volume to detect presence of a hidden container.

Hidden Operating Systems

Hidden operating system is a system that is installed in a hidden TrueCrypt volume.